Data Corruption Forces Chinese Hearthstone Servers to Roll Back

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Data Corruption Forces Chinese Hearthstone Servers to Roll Back

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The Chinese Hearthstone data centers were hit by a massive power failure on Saturday which resulted in severe data corruption. While Blizzard immediately deployed a team of engineers to address the situation, the lost data was deemed unrecoverable. To make matters worse, the power failure also damaged the backup data for the Chinese Hearthstone community.

Following a significant downtime this week, lasting over 40 hours, the company has finally issued an official statement. Since the data is lost, the Chinese Hearthstone servers are being rolled back four days to the a point before the power failure took place.

“After an extensive discussion of all available options, Blizzard and NetEase came to a collaborative decision to roll back game data to just before the point of the incident (14 January 15:20, 2017),” reads the announcement. “We hope you understand that performing a roll-back is the absolute last resort.”

Any progress made in the past four days will be wiped clean once the servers are rolled back. This includes level progression of heroes, ladder rankings, and changes to the card collection. Additionally, any card packs purchased with real money during this time will be refunded by Blizzard.

“One of our biggest priorities has always been the gameplay experience, and we’re acutely aware of the time and effort you’ve dedicated to the game,” the company added. “Due to this unusual incident, some of you are facing a lengthier climb up the ladder, others will be forced to re-enter the arena.”

The Chinese Hearthstone community is not too pleased about the server roll-back. There is mounting criticism against both Blizzard and NetEase for a lapse in communication. The game’s community representative took close to two days before publicly addressing the issue.

As for Blizzard China, it has promised to “dedicate all attention and resources to this incident” and make sure a similar scenario is avoided in the future. Furthermore, a compensation for the down-time was also mentioned. Details regarding that will be released once the servers are running smooth again. We should be hearing about it soon.